Media reports (especially the BBC in my experience) are notoriously bad what it comes to acupuncture. I’ve virtually given up on commenting on it. Yesterday a website calling itself Science 2.0 followed the same format. With the headline “Acupuncture Works To Reduce Menopause Hot Flashes – Meta-analysis” the article reports (in an almost off the cuff manner 3/4 the way through) that yes well those on sham acupuncture also benefited. Article here:

This topic has caused many controversies in Italy.
Acupuncturists are very sensitive about what is said about them, they say in all the ways that they use a scientific method that is already proved, they reported also this BBC video and the WHO report about acupuncture. I wrote a book in which I pointed out that acupuncture is a little more than a placebo, and that the studies show that its effects are not yet proven. This has caused weeks of controversy and has moved even the italian society of acupuncture and many acupuncturists with threats and insults against me. The president of the italian society of acupuncture claims that words such as “flow”, “Chi” and “meridians” “are only “metaphorical “and which today have been identified with modern concepts (hormonal “flows” and nervous reactions i.e.) and fully recognized by the medical science.

Your continued assault on acupuncture as a threat to patient safety is illogical. Death or serious injury by acupuncture is nominal when compared to prescription drug deaths, deaths from care in US Hospitals or death/injury from distracted driving. (To name but a few)

Are skeptics are only skeptical of fringe topics that receive gratuitous media attention? Are these other, more pervasive, causes of death simply the collateral damage of science based medicine/technology and therefore “off the hook” from equivalent skeptical analysis?

Prescription drugs:
“Every day in the United States, 113 people die as a result of drug overdose, and another 6,748 are treated in emergency departments (ED) for the misuse or abuse of drugs.2 Nearly 9 out of 10 poisoning deaths are caused by drugs.3″

ww.cdc.gov/homeandrecreationalsafety/overdose/facts.html

Medical Mistakes in U.S. Hospitals:
Now comes a study in the current issue of the Journal of Patient Safety that says the numbers may be much higher 2014 between 210,000 and 440,000 patients each year who go to the hospital for care suffer some type of preventable harm that contributes to their death, the study says.

That would make medical errors the third-leading cause of death in America, behind heart disease, which is the first, and cancer, which is second.

Distracted Driving:
The number of people killed in distraction-affected crashes decreased slightly from 3,360 in 2011 to 3,328 in 2012. An estimated 421,000 people were injured in motor vehicle crashes involving a distracted driver, this was a nine percent increase from the estimated 387,000 people injured in 2011.

Acupuncture Death rate:
“These studies have shown an incidence of mild, transient acupuncture-related adverse events that ranges from 6.71% to 15%. The most common adverse events of this type were local pain from needling (range: 1.1–2.9%) and slight bleeding or haematoma (range: 2.1–6.1%). In a prospective observational study of 190 924 patients, the incidence of serious adverse events (death, organ trauma or hospital admission) was about 0.024%.5 Another large-scale observational study showed a rate of adverse events requiring specific treatment of 2.2% (4963 incidents among 229 230 subjects).6 Studies such as these have shown that in extremely rare cases acupuncture can lead to serious, sometimes life-threatening complications, in addition to mild and transient adverse events.”

You have completely missed the point. Any evaluation of a proposed course of action must consider both the cost and the benefits of that course of action.

Unless you are some sort of crank you would not propose that someone avoid going to a hospital for medical treatment because of the existence of medical mistakes which may occur there. Frankly the same logic would rule out any form of medical treatment in which case we might as well leave accident victims lying on the side of the road.

By contrast, acupuncture provides no benefit other than a possible placebo effect. (At least that conclusion is strongly implied by the studies to date.) So while the harm is no where near as great as the other examples which you have raised, the net result of a cost benefit calculation is clearly negative.

Perhaps you can suggest some other topic for discussion in this forum with an even greater net negative result. The ones which you have so far suggested do not qualify.

By the way, please do not suggest that by inference I believe that there is a benefit associated with “distracted” driving — only driving in general. Now if someone were to argue in favor of distracted driving I suspect that topic would get a thorough airing here.

Look at all the money we waste pointing out the dangers of certain items or behaviors when there are much more dangerous issues to be dealt with. Vastly more people die of drowning than of brain cancers, yet we pay brain surgeons much more than we pay lifeguards. What a waste!

And Teaser is right to point out the comparison of acupuncture to pharmaceuticals. It is stupid of us to fund the FDA and other agencies to ensure drugs do something other than just provide placebo theatrics. By demanding proof of efficacy, we force drug companies to put chemicals in their pills that actually DO stuff to our bodies and brains. Think of the risk! We all would be so much safer and better off if we removed the efficacy requirements for drugs and just let pharmaceutical companies sell us sugar pills wrapped in convincing advertising. Then we’d have a safe and happy public not living under the constant fear that their drugs or procedures might actually affect them physically.

When I had pneumonia and when my wife had Lyme disease, we were constantly afraid that the drugs we took might actually do something in our bodies. How much better we would have slept if we’d followed Teaser’s philosophy and just gone to a homeopath or a reiki healer or an adcupuncturist with an unblemished safety record.

Am I the only one wondering why the BBC put this up eight years after it was originally broadcast? And so soon after they made the very admirable move of dropping false balance? Was someone at the BBC just blindly posting old shows without paying attention to the content? Just seems odd (and before anyone even thinks to ask: no, I am not suggesting any conspiracy, just dumbness).

It’s Disappointing to see a scientist science training go off the rails like that. She’s a physicist, No medical training, but she suppose to be trained in understanding how studys, and stats work. She must had a previous belief in it. it seem that again even critical thinking is not embedded enough evn in scientist minds.

I wonder if SSR will end up here, Each time the word acupuncture is written in a article on SBM, you can be sure that our master troll SSR will come with his backpack full of fallacies. Well Teaser seems to have replaced him here.

“Your continued assault on acupuncture as a threat to patient safety is illogical. Death or serious injury by acupuncture is nominal when compared to prescription drug deaths, deaths from care in US Hospitals or death/injury from distracted driving. (To name but a few)”

Your first sentence is nonsensical – opposition to anything that costs someone money, and misleads the public on science is never illogical.

Prescription drug deaths…and how many lives are these drugs having an actual positive effect on? You woo believers seem to forget this aspect of modern medical science. You’d rather provide something that does absolutely nothing – letting people die or remain sick regardless, than apply modern science to the problem and treat the vast majority of issues something like acupuncture can’t. It’s misleading and disengenuous. As for people dying in hospitals, yeah – when people are ill or injured they sometimes die, and where do those people congregate primarily?

Finally distracted driving? strawman? non-sequitor?

“Medical Mistakes in U.S. Hospitals:”

I notice you don’t provide any links to the number of successes in US Hospitals. Too coneveniently works against your ridiculous argument?

“Acupuncture Death rate:”

lol, so it doesn’t TREAT anything but apparently does harm….hmm see where you’ve gone wrong here?